False Courage

False Courage

 

False Courage

 

A number of years ago a fellow who had been a member of the KGB in what was then Czechoslovakia and had fled to Canada told me that we had no concept of the Eastern mentality. He probably would have been right had my ancestors not had several hundred years of experience with it. Their bones and ashes are scattered all the way from Chortitza to Kazakhstan to unknown destinations Siberia. To a degree, he had been right in that the owners of those bones had stood up for their beliefs and by and large become martyrs in the rest of the world. But for the Russians - they didn’t give a rip. They just kept murdering and killing and if you were lucky, exile to the far reaches of Siberia.

There has been more and more evidence over time that Vladimir Putin is the incarnation of Josef Stalin. As the former head of the KGB he has shown it time and again. Certainly he knows how to operate inside that system. His ability to negotiate himself into the presidency a second time and to rid himself of any opposition attests to the character of the person.

Given all that, just how does the gay community figure on making any human rights headway against that sort of government? I get the idea that the protesters have the lofty notion that protesting will show these thugs up and that no harm will come to them; that the Russian government will be shamed into compliance. Yeah – right. Not! They’re walking right in to the lion’s den when they go to the home country of the government they want to change its policy and they expect it to listen. That seems a little naïve to me. A country that sent Napoleon’s army packing, and the German army twice in a row isn’t likely to listen to a bunch of high minded protesters. It just doesn’t compute.

It seems to me a better plan would be to converge on the IOC en masse with a vengeance they have not known before and either shut the games down altogether or have them take action against the Russians: in other words pull the games from Sochi and ban the Russians from any future games. Its time those buggers sittin’ on their lofty thrones got pulled down a little bit. If they had any sense of fair play they’d have looked after this a long time ago, but they’re so busy preservin’ their profits, they got no time for human rights. It’s high time the athletes got their priorities straight and make their demands known where it counts – in the IOC, and if the IOC don’t respond, then withhold their services. After all, what are the Olympic games without athletes? At least that’s how it seems to me from up here on the top shelf.

Just sayin’.